Maybe the Gray Lady should eat crow for Thanksgiving

posted at 9:47 am on November 22, 2008 by Ed Morrissey

I’m always amused by people who decry the slaughter of animals for food as some barbaric practice, as if people haven’t been eating meat for the entire history of homo sapiens. Where, exactly, do people like the editors of the New York Times think the turkey for their Thanksgiving originates — a Star Trek replicator? Instead of laughing off what was a poor decision by Palin’s staff for an interview location, we instead hear shrieks of executions from the Gray Lady:

We’ve differed with Sarah Palin a great deal on substance. We don’t agree with her hardline approach to the Iraq War, her harsh anti-government rhetoric, and her style of negative campaigning.

But we also worry a bit about, how should we put it, the persona she has brought with her to national politics. We did not care at all for the swipe she took against community organizers at the Republican National Convention.

And then there’s this. You don’t have to be a huge animal lover to question why Governor Palin chose to be interviewed — while issuing a traditional seasonal pardon of a turkey — while turkeys were being executed in the background.

I read about this clip from Allahpundit and other bloggers before I bothered to watch it, and I thought it would be much worse. Color me underwhelmed:

If this is what twisted the NYT’s knickers, then make sure no one ever takes them to an industrial-scale slaughterhouse. This is basically free-range handling. We’re not seeing vast machinery beheading a string of turkeys in some sort of dehumanized assembly-line process.

One man butchers a turkey for food (two, actually), and the New York Times gets the vapors. Have any of them ever eaten meat? At all? The editors of the Times should declare right now whether they plan to eat real turkey on Thanksgiving, and/or use turkey in sandwiches from now on. If so, how would they expect to have that available to them without the kind of process seen in this clip? Did they think that turkeys somehow committed suicide and left wills donating their bodies to family dining tables around the world?

Executed. Someone send the Times a vat of smelling salts.

I’ll be home with my family in California for Thanksgiving this year, while my son’s famly heads to Alabama for a Southern Thanksgiving with my daughter-in-law’s family. We will be enjoying all of the trimmings as well as the traditional turkey, and I doubt that any of us will be surprised to learn that someone killed the turkey before we shoved it into the oven. Maybe the New York Times considers that news in Manhattan, but that only gives readers an idea of how out-of-touch the Paper of Shrieking Hysteria has become.

Update: Tom Maguire thought that the birds committed suicide after several hours of forced listening to NPR. Now, that would just be cruel.